Even non-francophiles will know of Astérix, the little Gaul whose adventures have sold more than 300 million books, and some will have read about Lucky Luke, the cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow.

They are the most famous cartoon figures created by France's most prolific and influential comic strip author, René Goscinny.

Now, more than 25 years after he died of a heart attack, the full variety of 2,000 published heroes and villains that sprang from his imagination has been collected for what will be France's bestselling Christmas present - the 1,250-page Dictionnaire Goscinny.

Goscinny, from an immigrant eastern European family, described himself as 'the other one' because he was 'only' the writer who thought up the characters and plots, while much of the glory fell on the shoulders of artists such as Albert Uderzo, who drew Astérix.

'Goscinny acted as a sort of powerful detonator that made France the centre of a graphic explosion which has its echoes today,' said Aymar du Chatenet, who helped prepare the dictionary.

The dictionary, with Goscinny's sketches, restores him to his rightful place somewhere between his friend, Harvey Kurtzman of Mad, and Walt Disney (who refused him a job), while providing one of the most enlightening sociological insights into late twentieth century France. Goscinny became the leader of an anti-intellectual, self-mocking counterculture.

While Goscinny books will sell in millions this Christmas, the eternal competition between the author's children's magazine, Pilote, and Hergé's rival Belgian weekly, Tintin, will be limited to memories of a 30-year struggle for juvenile minds that ended when the pair disappeared at the end of the 1980s. But traces of both publications and the scores of books they inspired remain an integral part of the French psyche.

Pilote, where Astérix first appeared in 1959, provided a fund of catchphrases still used by politicians and commentators. The constant demand by the ignoble Iznogoud, vizier in ancient Baghdad, to become 'caliph in the place of the caliph' is now taken as the unspoken refrain of the ambitious Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who means to challenge Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2007.

Other constantly repeated catchphrases such as 'These Romans are mad' (Astérix and Obélix ) or 'Shut up, Averill (The Dalton brothers in Lucky Luke) go as far back as 1951, when Goscinny and Uderzo created the precursors of the two famous Gaulois whose adventures have earned millions.

The models were a red Indian chief called Oumpah-Pah who fought colonial invaders alongside his aristocratic sidekick, Hubert de Flaky-Pastry who came up with: 'Fi, I know no fear.'

Oumpah-Pah, created when Goscinny was 25, was destined for Hergé's Tintin, and contained elements of chauvinism and distrust for the United States that were sublimated in Astérix. Goscinny dreamed up the Oumpah-Pah strip during France's postwar American dream period.

The strip flopped, but none the less set the basic rules for Astérix; magic potion, puns and village-based resistance movement included. The Oumpah-Pah joke did not appeal, but the same theme boomed with Astérix and the return of de Gaulle as president.